


The Surfer Bum

by bad_pheasants



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Angst, F/F, Introspection, Missing Scene, Near Death Experiences, POV switch, Possibly Unrequited Love, Regret, Strangers to Lovers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-08
Updated: 2018-04-08
Packaged: 2019-04-20 05:25:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14253966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bad_pheasants/pseuds/bad_pheasants
Summary: It’s the kind of story that her classmates, her closest friends—all would’ve called “larger than life”. The kind of legendary that people try to inspire themselves to be in the morning with stupid motivational quotes and ever-more-absurd ways of reminding themselves to “Seize The Day!”; “Live Life To The Fullest!”Alex thinks her life is just as half-lived as anyone else’s, really. It just has a few more bullet holes in it.Or: That missing-scene POV switch fic from "Alex" thatdoesn'tturn Alex into a prize to be fought over.





	The Surfer Bum

**Author's Note:**

> Look at this angstmuffin fall in love.
> 
> In case you didn't pay attention to the warnings: Near-death experiences (drowning), unrequited feels (tbh it'd be requited, but this is a one-shot, so--just imagine what you want), and so much angst.

If you listen to the things they say, they've always been _so close_. Closer than they should be, if the whispers at school were anything to go by (they never are). 

But somehow, not close enough. 

And now, Kara is far, far away, and all Alex can think of is how much she has to tell her. How much she wants to know. 

How it’s never been the right time. 

The water line crawls up the glass, up her body, and she figures—guess there’s no time left. 

//

It’s the kind of story that her classmates, her closest friends—all would’ve called “larger than life”. The kind of legendary that people try to inspire themselves to be in the morning with stupid motivational quotes and ever-more-absurd ways of reminding themselves to “Seize The Day!”; “Live Life To The Fullest!” 

Alex thinks her life is just as half-lived as anyone else’s, really. It just has a few more bullet holes in it. 

//

Her budding surfing career ended when she was sixteen. Not coincidentally, also the year her dad died. Another casualty of Kara’s presence in her life. 

If Dad hadn’t died, she’d have resented Kara more for it. Then again, if he hadn’t died, maybe she wouldn’t have had to quit permanently. 

But back then, so soon after that flight, that soaring feeling, those first glimmers of closeness between them, all quashed by that _lecture_ —

Alex was too frightened to put up a fight. 

There’s not much she regrets about this life, she reflects as the water hits her waist, but the feel of her board on the water, skimming the surface, the slick powerful cutting feeling—that comes pretty close, when she thinks about all her lost futures. Water was peace; that bizarre meditative mix of stillness and silence and violent potential, infinite possibilities and instant decisions and skating overtop disastrous undercurrents—a place she draws from, sometimes daily, though she hasn’t been out on the water since she was a teenager. J’onn was right, the night he recruited her—she’s the child of scientists, and not given to religious sentiments. But that perfect moment—

Something that wells up from inside her, something no one can take away. Sometimes it’s a blessing, but just as often, it’s a reminder of another life. A life lived out in the sun, unafraid. A life that wasn’t spent hiding, double- and triple-guessing. 

A life that never happened. 

She looks back at the run she’s had, looks at the blood on her hands, looks at the pale scars on her body on display for the camera watching her. She thinks of blue eyes and a bright smile, and doesn’t regret choosing this, but she thinks—she thinks it could’ve been a good life. 

The water inches higher. 

Water was peace. She was gonna be a surfer bum. She was gonna have trophies that neither of her parents did. It was gonna be all hers. 

It would’ve been a good life. 

//

Getting to know Kara was never in the cards. 

It was something her mom told her to do, first and foremost. They hadn’t even asked her whether or not she wanted a sister. Just decided. It was a tiny act of rebellion in a year that really allowed none: They took away her room, made her share it with a stranger. They took away her time and her social life, made her hang out with Kara. 

But they couldn’t make her care about Krypton. Or the sadness that would seemingly leak from Kara’s every pore, the nightmares that had her crying out in a strange language in her sleep. The nameless shadows that haunted her. 

Well. They _had_ names, but Alex didn’t bother asking what they were. 

She found out anyway, eventually. Slowly, year by year, as this girl she’d done her best not to know stayed, became rooted in her life. 

She never asked, because she didn’t want to. Then, she didn’t have to; did ghosts need names in order to banish them? But banishing was never really the goal. Alex never set out to be Kara’s hero. Just to help her feel better, sometimes. 

Then—and now—it was a silence, built up between them. 

And then, she joined the DEO, and suddenly it was a reversal—Kara’s world became hers, and Kara was the “normal” one, still in Alex’s world. Or maybe it was more like Alex was plunged headfirst into this vast universe, of which she’d had only the barest inkling, and for the first time, she felt the magnitude—just a fraction—of what Kara must have felt. Must still feel, day to day. 

On her first day, Hank showed Alex Kara’s pod, and it hit her almost as hard as the actual withdrawals she was going through concurrently—

She didn’t even know Kara. She’d never imagined, in all of her stubborn teenage refusal—never considered _this_. The scorch marks on the hull, mute evidence of the violent entry of this quiet girl into their lives; this alien metal with its color just _off_ from the steel around her, its shape too fluid to come from an industrial human mind, smooth and cool beneath her fingers. 

With a lurch of shame, she realized she had no connection between the girl Alex shared a room with, and the pod in front of her. 

But there was. Somewhere beyond Alex’s resentment, her self-centered anger at this girl who fell into her life and stole her parents’ affection and attention and ruined _everything_ —

She actually _fell_. From the sky. From somewhere so far away only her dad, who’d spent years working with Superman, was able to put it into a perspective she could understand. And after years of trying not to think about it, not even a daydream, like they could find them by telepathy—She remembered. Those conversations. What her dad must’ve thought, taking Kara in. Knowing what he knew. 

It was the closest she’d felt to him in a long time. And the furthest she’d ever felt from Kara. 

But if that wasn’t just a metaphor for their not-coexistence, the way their lives only barely brushed against each other: She could walk past it every day, could _work_ on it every day, this part of Kara, this piece of her world that she missed so keenly—and only feel the towering separation of their worlds, the immenseness of all the things she didn’t know, that she’d _refused_ to know—just a shadow of all the things that Kara carried in her mind, in her DNA—

In her soul, if there was such a thing. 

And she wore cardigans and glasses, and skirts that weren’t frumpy-long, but also not slutty-short, and stammered and fumbled, and tried to date and maintain a work-life balance. Because that’s what they asked her to do. While Alex got to work on the pod that brought her to this planet. 

Alex learned Kryptonese, to build Alura—the AI was her frame of reference for the name, the first time it had a face, maybe the third or fourth time she even heard Kara’s mother’s name—to understand Kara’s pod, and then, a few too many late nights into the idea to deny that’s what she was doing, to build a little Fortress of Solitude, a cement and rebar and crystal shrine underground—for Kara. 

But it was never _hers_ ; never “Alex’s project”. Not the way the scientists and the field agents at the DEO casually claimed ownership of their pet projects, their “fields”, their personal obsessions. Not the way they broke down and classified every species they encountered, every star and phenomenon, scrambling to put their name on it, or any name, like it was a trophy, something unknown and endlessly powerful, until they’d corralled it in a word. 

Alex was just a guest here, walking through someone else’s memory. 

And every time she’d look at that alien metal, trace her fingers over those symbols, she’d remember that acutely. She’d realize, staring at this part of the story that she’d never bothered to imagine, that Kara was from somewhere else. 

She looked at the sun crystal that Alura had placed in the pod, classified and handled and poked and prodded and ultimately deemed unusable, and she remembered her dad’s conversations with Superman about his “father’s crystal”. 

And when she got it to work, and the first face Alura saw was Alex’s, not Kara’s, decades after she left this little part of herself to watch over Kara—Alex felt down in her bones the intrusiveness of her presence. 

But this is the story of them, too: Alex still walked away with the revelation—This is the face Kara was missing, all this time. And she didn’t even tell Kara. _I saw your mother today._ She _couldn't_ tell her. Not the first or last time that felt like a cop-out, or the first time she felt like a fraud; but the one she can't forget. 

_It’s been thirty years since you saw her face. But I saw her for the first time today._ This woman who couldn’t save herself, or her planet—but she saved her daughter. The daughter who Alex had done nothing but resent and try to _manage_ and make less demanding and embarrassing when all she was—

Was in pain. 

Alex purposefully never learned what Kara said, in the phrases she’d murmur or yell somewhere between comatose sleep and wide awake—purposefully tried to forget. But _ieiu_ and _ukr_ still evoke a bone-deep ache. She never needed Kara to tell her. 

She wondered what happened, what the launch bay looked like, what all the parts were. 

She wondered what happened to that woman’s daughter. 

Except she did know. _She_ happened. Alex happened. 

She didn’t really know Kara. And that was her choice. 

It was like an apology, everything she built, in those three years working by herself, in her off-hours, on overnight shifts. But like all apologies that don’t include the words “I’m sorry”, it was a pretty shitty apology. 

It’s them, though: Always glancing off each other, always indirect, silent and faraway when they should be close, when their words could build the bridge between them that they want—

Close, uneasily close, because of the shaky truces based on silence that let them live side-by-side in spite of the resentment and hurt. Because of the understanding that filled in quietly with time. 

It was never enough. Never close enough, or far enough. So many questions, but always some crisis, another literal end of the world, or the consequences for speaking up would be dire.

So the silence wins, she supposes, by virtue of the same thing that got them past those first few years: 

It just outlasted them. 

//

After Myriad, she wanted to ask Kara so many questions, questions about her home planet that stopped after Jeremiah’s apparent death, that desperately-enforced “normalcy” like it could prevent Kara from being what she is—unhesitatingly generous with herself and her gifts, full of the need to _help_ people and annoyingly demanding as much of herself as she can give. 

Which naturally outs her as that other thing that she is: One of the last survivors of a dead culture that she grieved for every single day, _alien_ , Kryptonian. 

And then Alex would see her, smiling and wearing that crest, that jarring clash of her home—and she would remember the plain white of Kara’s tunic, the unobtrusive ridging of the crest, the bone-deep unfathomable _meaning_ it had for Kara, especially in those first years—

And how much Alex had _hated_ it. 

But now, she gets to wear that crest again, that garish blue-red-yellow theater prop, that cultural icon that screams “alien” to billions of humans, but to her, to _Kara_ … 

Did it ever really feel like _hers_? _Can_ it ever really feel like a piece of Krypton? Or is it just an appropriation, an encapsulation of a human idea of her people, her species, her _mission_ , when her true mission was so very different, _alien_ in a way that had nothing to do with that crest that popped up on keychains and t-shirts all around her—alien because it had nothing at all to do with _humanity_? 

Is this as close as she feels she can ever come to Krypton, the _real_ Krypton, the language she spoke every day until she was thirteen years old—Is this the only part she feels allowed to show, after so many years spent in fear? 

Alex had so many questions, there’s so _much_ to all of this—and then she sees Kara, living and breathing it, walking the tightrope of it, smiling and proud or dirty and tear-stained or beaten and bloody and raging and terrified and so brave, endlessly defiant, and it closes her throat and cinches her chest with how _much_ Kara is, like Alex’s heart could tear itself in half if it could give that frightened alien girl she knows still lives somewhere under there some kind of shelter—

And then Kara talks about leaving. She talks about Metropolis, and her last living family that she longs for even though they abandoned her, even though they turned her family’s symbol into a gimmick, made it a symbol of _human_ ideals and _human_ potential. And all those abstract concepts, those hopeful rediscovered questions, that blossoming _insight_ , collapses in on itself like a house of cards propped over a vacuum, and suddenly she’s a sullen thwarted teenager again, another boulder thrown her way, a sibling she didn’t want, a responsibility she never asked for and should never have been asked to carry, the lives around her thriving while her own very limited (she’s painfully aware) supply is spooled out of her for others—others who will always leave, who will never _see_. She’s a desperate girl drinking herself back into control, that desperate girl in an adult’s body who has no patience for the kind of wallowing that she was never allowed. 

Because Alex—Alex was never allowed this. This _luxury_ of uncertainty. Longing. Irresponsibility. 

Ideals. 

In the end, she ends up going back home, and cleaning her guns, just her and the oil and the mechanical parts, and thinking about how she bragged to Lex Luthor’s mother: _I killed Astra of the House of El with a sword made of Kryptonite_. 

_I drove that sword between me and the sister of my heart, because I have_ never _been allowed the luxury of hesitation._

_I did my duty, and it has cost me everything. My father. My innocence. My body_ hurts _like someone much older than me._

_It cost me the one light I had left in my life._

_And I will still spit in your face, because you are_ wrong. 

//

The water closes in an icy ring around her neck, and she’s already stripped off her outer layers—no use running out of energy and drowning prematurely because she didn’t want to strip. 

The pressure of the water crowds words in her throat like toothpaste in a rolled-up tube. Some of them in English; some of them in Kryptonian. 

_This belongs to you._

_How do you say—?_

_I love you._

_I’m sorry._

In retrospect, celebrating Kara’s “Earth Birthday”, all the ways Alex has refused to accommodate Kara’s presence in her life, Kara’s life in hers, demanded that she give up her weirdness and her alienness and then taken away the remaining parts of her Kryptonian life—and the way Kara was always so delighted when they celebrated it, like it was really special, like it was anything more than a cop-out? 

Kara just wanted to be acknowledged. And Alex had _done_ it, maybe—but in the most asinine way possible. 

She thinks of Kara in her cardigans and it hurts her, what Kara has become, what she’s closed herself off from, because of Alex, because Kara just wanted to not be alone—alone in this universe, alone with what she was going through. 

_I’m sorry for taking your world away from you all over again._

_All of this should have belonged to you._

_All of this belongs to you._

// 

Her heart’s racing too hard and there’s too little of a sliver of air left for her to think much. Time’s up; it’s do or die. 

So this is how it ends, she thinks, maybe. With the two of them as thwarted strangers despite their intertwined lives. Despite all the pain they’ve caused and the blood on their hands that can only belong to each other. 

In that light, sappy platitudes like dropping “sister” in every sentence feel like giving a Hallmark card to someone after watching their world die—A whole lot of signaling, nothing much changed. 

// 

Sure, she was _supposed_ to be a lot of things. A surfing champion, a bioengineer, a protector, a sister. 

_You were supposed to be_ better _than me_ , her mom’s voice echoes. 

Kara might get here in time. She might not. It’s probably safer for Kara if she doesn’t, Alex muses. 

The moron behind this won’t live out the day, either way. 

It’s with a grim sort of satisfaction that she feels her heart pounding like it’s about to explode inside her chest, the fuzzy grey starting to eat at the edges of her vision while she swings, heedless of the shattering pain in her knuckles. It’s better this way. It took a million extinguished futures to get her here, some girl in a glass tank who’s not allowed to belong to herself, or to matter, except if it comes to Kara and manipulating her. 

These are the choices she made. She won’t be used. 

She won't be used.


End file.
